Sara Shepard - Seven Minutes in Heaven

Emma straightened in her chair. Her hands trembled, but she tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Hey, thanks for recording this. I’m glad whoever’s going to listen will hear you harassing a grieving teenager without her parents in the room.”

That seemed to startle him. He glanced at the recorder, then back at her. “Look, I’m just saying, given your history the whole thing seems kind of far-fetched.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t get to write my own life,” Emma snapped. That was true enough , she thought. “Sorry you don’t like the plot.”

Quinlan held up his hands defensively. “All right, I’m sorry. You’re right.” He sighed. “Can you just do me one favor, though?”

“What?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Can I swab your cheek?” She frowned, but he persisted. “I don’t want to go into details, but your sister’s body wasn’t in great shape when we found it. We just want to make sure that she is your biological twin. A quick DNA test will resolve the whole thing.”

Emma bit her lip. There was something about it that she didn’t like—Quinlan’s rapid-fire questioning had left her feeling vulnerable and confused. But there was no way a DNA test could incriminate her—she and Sutton would be identical, and refusing would seem suspicious. She nodded.

Quinlan extracted a Q-tip from a clear plastic tube in his briefcase. She opened wide, and he ran it along the inside of her cheek, peering into her mouth like a dentist. Then he briskly slid the swab back in the tube and slammed his briefcase shut.

“Wait right here,” he said. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes.”

With that he turned to the door and was gone.

An uneasy feeling descended on me in the silence left in his wake. I didn’t trust Quinlan. He was almost as crafty as I’d been. And now he was out of sight. But that also meant that Emma was alone—and he’d left the files on the table. It was finally time to see how I’d died.

Emma counted to ten, holding her breath so she could hear Quinlan’s movements as he went down the hall. A distant door opened and shut, and then there was silence. When she was sure he was gone, she grabbed the file that listed her own name.

She flipped it open—and immediately dropped it. The file landed on the table in front of her, gaping open. Paper-clipped to the inside of the folder was a photo of a skeleton.

Emma’s throat went dry. She’d known there would probably be post-mortem pictures in the file, but she hadn’t stopped to imagine what they’d look like. She couldn’t swallow; her tongue felt like sandpaper inside her mouth. But she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. What if there were clues the cops hadn’t known to look for? She had to see those pictures.

The body’s empty eye sockets stared straight up at the sky. Brightly colored leaves partially covered it, red and gold and brown. Scraps of skin still clung to the bones, and its long hair spread out behind it, dried out and bleached red by sun and exposure. The skull’s awful grin was a strange contrast to the faded pink hoodie still zipped around the corpse’s torso.

I gazed at the picture, unable to tear my eyes away from what little remained of the body I’d left behind. Staring at the skull, I could just trace out the memory of my own features—there were my high cheekbones, my narrow chin. But I didn’t feel much connection with the bones in the picture. They didn’t have anything to do with me anymore. Weirdly, Emma’s body felt more like mine than my own did.

There were other photos, paper-clipped behind the first, capturing the body from different angles. It looked like Sutton had been wearing yellow cotton shorts the night she went to the canyon. Close-ups revealed splintered bones, and one showed a jagged hole near the crown of the skull.

The more she looked at the pictures, the stranger Emma felt. She’d known for months her sister was dead. Between the killer strangling her in Charlotte’s kitchen and dropping a theater light next to her in the school auditorium, and most recently, what happened to Nisha, there was really no room for doubt. But still, still , there had been some small, hopeful part of her that thought Sutton might walk back into town someday, laughing at the success of her best Lying Game prank yet. Staring down at the pictures of the body, though, there was no room left for hope or fantasy.

This was what had happened to her sister. This was all that was left of her.

Of course, everyone thought this was Emma’s body. There was nothing to tell them apart—not even the DNA in their bones. Looking at Sutton’s dead body was like looking at pictures of herself dead.

A dry spasm shot through her, and bile filled her mouth. She went to a low metal garbage can and spit into it, wishing desperately that she’d asked Quinlan for a glass of water before he’d left.

She went back to the table and sat down again, shaking slightly, fighting to suppress her nausea. On the other side of the folder were stacks of forms and reports, collated and stapled. She picked up a facial reconstruction sketch that showed a young woman’s features, from the front and then again in profile. It was almost spookier than the actual remains—there was something uncanny about seeing her own face, drawn by someone who had never actually seen her but who had built the image up from her sister’s bones. All the details were right. The artist had gotten the features perfectly, but something was off in the eyes and the lips. Of course, those would be the hardest things to imagine with only the skeleton for a guide.

Next she picked up a diagram of the crime scene, sketched from multiple angles, that showed both the body’s distance from the road and the spot the investigators thought she’d fallen from, high overhead. Her breath caught as she recognized the area on the map: Sutton had fallen from a precipice very close to the spot where the girls had held their fake séance just a few weeks earlier.

She thought back to the faint voice she’d heard in her head that night, so familiar in her ear. It had told her to run. It had sounded like it was coming from far, far away. But maybe it had been closer than she’d thought.

It had come from me.

Finally there was the coroner’s report. The medical examiner had enumerated Sutton’s injuries, and the list was long. On one page he’d sketched the locations of the wounds and fractures on a schematic outline of her body.

Victim has more than a dozen separate bruises and thirteen lacerations over her limbs and torso. Victim’s tibia and three ribs are fractured, and left shoulder is dislocated. Victim also suffered depressed skull fracture directly over right eye, causing subdural hematoma and massive hemorrhage.

Emma bit hard on the inside of her mouth, her blood salty and metallic on her tongue. Her sister had died in a lot of pain, and a side note mentioned that it looked like wild animals of some kind had “disturbed” the body. Emma didn’t want to think about that. She turned the page.

These injuries are all consistent with an accidental fall.

The words froze her in her seat. Accidental fall?

I froze, too. They thought it was an accident? How was that possible? I reached frantically through my memory to conjure up the last image I had of that night in the canyon. Once again I felt Garrett’s hand on my shoulder, his voice in my ear. I willed myself to turn around, to face him and find out what he had done to me—but the memory went dark. All I could pull up was that sickly sense of vertigo I’d had when Quinlan had first announced that I’d fallen. Garrett must have pushed me over the side—but there had to be a clue, some indication that he’d done it on purpose. What happened to me—what had happened to Emma and Nisha since—had been no accident.